A QUICK-FIRE presentation event which has been staged all over the world is coming to the North East for the first time.
Codeworks is organising an Ignite event at Newcastle's Centre for Life on February 9, bringing together speakers from high-profile companies and organisations including Accenture and Durham Business School.
The format, which was devised by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis in Seattle in late 2006, challenges speakers to talk for five minutes on a business or personal passion, using a set of 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. The North East organisation is arranging the event with the blessing of Ignite organisers O’Reilly, and will be one of more than 100 cities across the world staging such presentations as part of Global Ignite Week. Cities including Boston, Mumbai, Bucharest, Sydney and Amsterdam will all feature events between February 7 and 11.
Chris Laws, who is organising the Newcastle event, said: “They’re pretty quirky events. Rather than have a couple of speakers talk for half an hour each, each presenter has only five minutes. You can hear talks on all sorts of things from a variety of different people, and it’s much less straight-laced.
“Usually at these events people speak about everything from the existence of fairies to how to win at scrabble, but we wanted to include more of a business element in there. It’s a mix of light-hearted and business topics.”
Codeworks is arranging the event as part of its monthly Think and a Drink meet-ups. John Catnach of Accenture will be coming to the Centre for Life to talk about the work the company is doing in the digital community, while Marian Hardley of Durham Business School is to speak on Facebook and “the fear of losing attention”. Ideonic’s Jeremiah Alexander will discuss how entrepreneurs are like drug dealers, Bobby Patterson of Happiest will be talking about happiness, while Brett Jacobson of Mediaworks will lay out 2011’s “next big thing” with a whistlestop tour of conversion rate optimisation. Dolly Wagon’s Jason Brownlee will talk about hidden patterns and intelligence in web and social media data, and Thap’s Graham Morley will be giving a presentation entitled: Every Body Tells a Story – How to Read Friends and Influence People.
Tickets are £10+VAT, or free for Codeworks members.
The event will also feature information on the Centre for Life’s ScienceFest between March 12 and 17.
Codeworks is also hosting an investment seminar with the North East Angel Fund at Gateshead International Business Centre on February 23 to discuss how to secure venture capital. A live webcast of the TED conference will be screened at Gateshead College on March 2, while on April 12 Connect will partner with Service Network to host an event called Future Proofing Your Business – Get Better or Get Beaten.